Against the Valentinians

And so we are marked among them as simple, as being only that and not also wise: as though wisdom were immediately compelled to depart from simplicity, whereas the Lord joins both: Be ye wise as serpents, and simple as doves. Or if we are therefore foolish because we are simple; are they therefore not simple because they are wise? But those who are not simple are most harmful, just as those who are not wise are most foolish. And yet I would rather be taken as having the better fault on that side, if perhaps it is preferable to know less than to err worse, to err than to deceive. Moreover, the face of God looks upon those who seek in simplicity, as Wisdom herself teaches—not Valentinus's Wisdom, but Solomon's. Then infants bore witness to Christ with their blood. Do you call those who cry out for the cross a voice of boys? They were neither boys nor infants, that is, they were not simple.

The Apostle also bids us become children again according to God, so that we may be infants in malice through simplicity, and thus at last wise in understanding; at the same time given into the order of wisdom flowing from simplicity. In sum, it is the dove that has been accustomed to reveal Christ, but the serpent to tempt. The former, from the beginning, a herald of divine peace; the latter, from the beginning, a plunderer of the divine image. Thus simplicity alone will more readily be able both to know God and to show him; prudence alone rather to shake and to betray.

Let the serpent therefore hide itself as much as it can, and twist all its cunning through the windings of its lairs, dwell in the depths, be thrust into darkness, uncoil its length through tortuous passages, advance crookedly, never wholly visible at once—a beast that flees the light. Our dove's house too is simple, always in high and open places and toward the light. The figure of the Holy Spirit loves the East, the figure of Christ. Truth blushes at nothing except only at being hidden: for neither will he be ashamed to lend his ears to it, when he recognizes God, whom nature has already entrusted to him, whom he perceives daily in all his works, known only the less by this one thing—that he did not think him unique, that he named him among a number, that he worshipped him in others.

Otherwise, to draw him away from their crowd to another multitude, to transfer him from a familiar sovereignty to an unknown one, to turn him back from the manifest to the hidden, is to offend faith on the very threshold. Now if one is also initiated into the whole fable, will not something of this sort be granted—that you heard it in childhood amid the difficulties of sleep from a nurse: the towers of Lamia, and the combs of the sun? But one who comes to the faith from another conscience, if he straightway finds so many names of Aeons, so many marriages, so many offspring, so many departures, so many outcomes, prosperities, adversities, of a divinity scattered and cut to pieces—will he hesitate to pronounce on the spot that these are the fables and endless genealogies which the spirit of the Apostle, when the seeds of heresy were already then sprouting for the second time, forestalled in condemning?

Rightly therefore not simple, rightly only prudent, are those who neither readily bring such things forward nor openly defend them, nor even teach all those whom they instruct fully; cunningly, no doubt, as with shameful things: otherwise inhumanly, if they were honorable. And yet we who are simple know everything. Finally, we have armed this first wedge of engagement as a detector and designator of their whole secret, and we take this as our first victory: because what is hidden at such great cost, even merely to point it out is to destroy it.

We know, I say, most fully their very origin as well, and we know why we call them Valentinians, even though they do not appear to be so. For they have departed from their founder, but the origin is by no means erased; and if by chance they change, the very change is testimony. Valentinus had hoped for the episcopate, since he was capable both in talent and in eloquence. But when another obtained the position by the prerogative of martyrdom, indignant, he broke away from the Church of the authentic rule, as minds stirred up on account of precedence are wont to be inflamed with the presumption of revenge, and turned to assailing the truth; and having obtained the seed of a certain ancient opinion, he traced out a path for Colarbasus. Ptolemy afterwards paved this path, distinguishing the names and numbers of the Aeons into personal substances, but determined outside of God—substances which Valentinus had enclosed within the very summit of the divinity, as senses and affections and motions.

Heracleon also drew certain byways from thence, and Secundus, and the magician Marcus. Theotimus labored much concerning the images of the Law. Thus Valentinus is now nowhere; and yet there are Valentinians, who exist through Valentinus. Axionicus of Antioch alone to this day consoles the memory of Valentinus by the complete keeping of his rules: Otherwise so much is it permitted to recommend itself to this heresy, as it is customary for a she-wolf daily to put on the form of a female. Why not? Since they reckon that spiritual seed of theirs thus in each individual. If they have built up anything new, they straightway call the presumption a revelation, and the talent a charism; and not unity, but diversity. And so we foresee, setting aside that customary dissimulation of theirs, that very many will be divided on certain points, and will say even in good faith: This is not so; and, I take this differently; and, I do not recognize this.

For by variety the face of the rules is renewed, and it also has the colors of ignorances.

But my boundary will be with the archetypes of the principal masters, not with the affected leaders of passive disciples. Nor shall we anywhere be said to have ourselves fabricated the materials, which so many men already distinguished by holiness and excellence—not only our predecessors, but contemporaries of the heresiarchs themselves—have both exposed and refuted in most learned volumes: such as Justin the philosopher and martyr, such as Miltiades the sophist of the Churches, such as Irenaeus the most diligently curious explorer of all doctrines, such as our Proculus, the dignity of virginal old age and of Christian eloquence: whom in every work of faith, as in this one, I would wish to follow. Or if heresies do not exist at all, those who drive them away will be believed to have fabricated them, and the Apostle who proclaimed them will lie. But if they do exist, they will be no other than those which are re-examined. No one is reported to be so idle with his pen as to have materials and yet fabricate them.

In this little book, therefore, in which we promise only a demonstration of that secret, lest the obscurity overwhelm anyone on account of names so foreign, so forced, so compounded, and so ambiguous, I will first set down how we intend to use them. For the translation of some from the Greek does not yield a correspondingly ready form of the name, for some not even the genders agree with the sex, for some the acquaintance is more familiar in Greek. And so we shall use Greek for the most part; the meanings will be present at the margins of the pages, nor indeed will Greek be lacking alongside the Latin, but will be noted above in the lines, so that this may be the mark of personal names, on account of the ambiguities of those which share meaning with something else. Although I have deferred the engagement, having for the present professed narration alone, yet wherever the unworthiness shall have merited a lash, there will be no full assault by a merely passing taste.

Count it, Reader, as a sport of engagement before the battle. I shall show wounds but not drive them home. If laughter is raised somewhere, the materials themselves will be satisfied: many things are so unworthy of being refuted, lest they be revered with gravity. Festivity properly yields to vanity. It also befits truth to laugh, because it rejoices; to mock its rivals, because it is secure. Care must plainly be taken lest its laughter be laughed at, if it be unworthy. But wherever laughter is worthy, it is a duty. In this manner, then, I shall begin.

First of all, Ennius the Roman poet simply pronounced the great dining-halls of heaven, from the name of its broad expanse, or because he had read in Homer of Jupiter feasting there. But how great the heights above heights, and how great the sublimities above sublimities, the heretics have suspended, raised up, and spread out as the dwelling of each of their gods—it is wonderful. Even for our Creator, Ennian dining-halls have been arranged in the form of little buildings, with other and other galleries built on top, and distributed to each god by as many staircases as there have been heresies. The world has become a lodging-house. You would think it the Insula Felicula, so many are the stories of the heavens—I know not where. For there the God of the Valentinians dwells at the topmost tiles. Him they call in substance indeed Perfect Aeon, but in person Proarche and Arche, and also Bythos; which was by no means fitting for one dwelling in the heights.

They define him as unbegotten, immeasurable, infinite, invisible, and eternal: as though they straightway proved his existence by defining him as such as we know he ought to be, so that he may thus also be said to have existed before all things. But I demand that he exist: nor do I censure anything more in this kind of thing than that those who are said to have existed before all things are found after all things, and indeed not their own. Let this Bythos therefore exist in the greatest and most lofty quiet for infinite ages past, in very great leisure, peacefully and, if I may so say, in the stupor of divinity, such as Epicurus ordained. And yet, though they will him to be alone, they give him a second person in himself and with himself—Ennoia, whom they also name Charis and moreover Sige. And perhaps in that most commended quiet they approach to advise him at last to bring forth the beginning of things from himself.

This he places in the womb, as it were, of his Sige, as in the genital places of the womb, in the manner of seed. She receives it at once, and becomes pregnant, and brings forth—in silence, of course, does Sige bring forth—and what she brings forth is Nous, most like the Father and equal to him in all things. Indeed he alone is sufficient to comprehend that immense and incomprehensible greatness of the Father. Thus he too is called Father, and the beginning of all things, and properly Monogenes. And yet not properly, since he is not acknowledged to be alone. For together with him there also proceeded a female—Truth—Monogenes, because first-begotten; how much more fittingly would he be called Protogenes! Therefore Bythos and Sige, Nous and Truth—the first four-in-hand of the Valentinian faction is maintained, the matrix and origin of all things.

For thereupon Nous, as soon as he received the office of his own emanation, himself also emits from himself Word and Life—which, if it did not exist before, certainly did not exist in Bythos either. And what manner of thing is it that Life was not in God! But this offspring also, sent forth for the beginning of the universe and the formation of the whole Pleroma, bears fruit, and begets Man and Church. You have the Ogdoad, the double Tetrad, from the conjunctions of males and females; the chambers, if I may so say, of the primordial Aeons: the fraternal marriages of the Valentinian gods: the whole census of heretical holiness and majesty: a crowd—I know not whether of crimes or of divinities—certainly the fount of the remaining fruitfulness.

For behold the second Tetrad: Word and Life, Man and Church, which had budded forth to the glory of the Father. Hence these too, exulting, bubble forth from their own substance other offspring for the Father, likewise conjugal ones, for they are of both natures: on the one side Word and Life pour forth Aeons together; on the other side Man and Church do so more abundantly, equaling their parents, because two together with those ten make as many as they themselves will be. I now give the names of those whom I call this decade: Ageratos and Henosis; Autophyes and Hedone; Acinetos and Syncrasis; Nono-Macaria. On the other hand, the duodenary number consists of these: Paracletus and Pistis; Patricos and Elpis; Me-Agape; Ainos and Synesis; Ecclesiasticus and Es; Theletus and Sophia. I am compelled here to bring forward, from an equal example, what these names lack.

Among the Carthaginians there was a certain very frigid Latin rhetorician named Phosphorus: when he was delivering a peroration on a brave man, he said: "I come, O best of citizens, from the battle, with my victory, with your good fortune, enlarged, glorious, fortunate, greatest, triumphant." And the students immediately cried: "The household of Phosphorus: phu!" You have heard Fortunata, and Hedone, and Acinetus, and Theletus—cry out: "The household of Ptolemy: phu!" This will be that secret Pleroma, the fullness of the divine thirty. Let us see what are the privileges of these numbers: the quaternary, the ogdoad, and the duodenary. Meanwhile, in the thirty all fertility is exhausted; the force and power and generative desire of the Aeons is castrated. As though there were not still so many more clusters of shoulders remaining, and no other names from the household. For why are not fifty and a hundred also begotten? Why are they not also called stercolae and syntrophi?

But this also is a matter of partiality among persons, that Nus alone of all enjoys knowledge of the immeasurable Father, rejoicing and exulting, while the others are assuredly grieving. Plainly Nus, so far as it lay in himself, had both wished and attempted to communicate to the rest as well what he knew—how great and how incomprehensible the Father is—but the mother Sige intervened, she, namely, who prescribes silence even to her own heretics: although they say it was done by the Father's nod, he wishing all to be inflamed with desire for him. And so, while they are tormented within themselves, while they burn with a silent longing to know the Father, a crime was nearly committed.

For among those twelve Aeons whom Man and Church had produced, the last-born Aeon (let the solecism be noted)—for Sophia is her name—through incontinence of herself, without the fellowship of her consort Philetus, bursts forth to inquire after the Father, and contracts the taint of a fault which had indeed begun from those others who were around Nus, but had flowed down into this one, that is into Sophia, as faults are wont, when born in one part of the body, to breathe their destruction into another member. But indeed, under the pretext of love for the Father, rivalry prevailed over Nus alone who rejoiced concerning the Father.

But when Sophia, striving after impossibilities, had been frustrated, and is overcome by the difficulty, and is stretched out by longing, she fell but little short, by force of sweetness and toil, of being devoured and dissolved into the remaining substance, nor would she have ceased save by perishing, had she not by good fortune run into Horos, (who also has a certain power, the foundation and external guardian of that universe) whom they also call the Cross, and Lytrotes, and Carpistes. Thus Sophia, freed from danger and slowly persuaded, having declined the investigation of the Father, came to rest, and put forth her whole Enthymesis, that is, her animation, together with the Passion which had additionally befallen her.

But certain ones have dreamed differently of the departure of Sophia and her restoration. After her fruitless efforts and the collapse of her hope, she was disfigured, I believe, by pallor and emaciation and neglect of her appearance, as one who grieved for the Father no less as denied than as lost. Thereafter, from that grief, alone by herself, with no operation of a consort, she conceived and brought forth a female. Do you marvel at these things? Even a hen has obtained the power to lay from her own self. But they also say that vultures are only female: and yet without a male the mother—First she was grieved on account of the incompleteness of the generation; then she feared lest an end too should press upon her; she was perplexed about the reason for her misfortune; she took thought for concealment. Remedies nowhere. For where were there now tragedies and comedies, from which she might borrow a form for exposing what had been born without shame?

While matters are in this evil state, she looks up, turns to the Father, but having striven in vain, and her strength failing her, she sank down into prayers. The whole kinship also supplicates on her behalf, and especially Nus—why not? The cause of so great an evil. Yet no escape came to Sophia, all her afflictions work their effect. For indeed that conflict at that time also reached the origin of Matter: ignorance, fear, grief, become substances. Then at last the Father, moved at some point, through Monogenes Nus, whom we mentioned above as Horos, brings forth into these things in his own image a female and a male, for on the Father's sex they thus vary. They add moreover that Horos is also called Metagogeus (that is, the circumductor) and Horothetes. They proclaim that by his work Sophia was both restrained from unlawful things, and purged from evils, and thereafter confirmed, and restored to her consort, and that she herself indeed remained in the census of the Pleroma.

But her Enthymesis and that appended Passion were banished by Horos and crucified, and made outside of it, the Evil, as they say, cast out: yet that substance was spiritual, as a certain natural impulse of an Aeon, but formless and without specific character, inasmuch as it had apprehended nothing: and therefore it was declared a weak and feminine fruit.

Therefore after the Enthymesis was cast out, and her mother Sophia restored to her consort, that Monogenes again, that Nus, plainly at leisure from the Father's care and oversight, for the consolidating of things and the fortifying of the Pleroma, and now for its fixing, lest any such shock should again strike it, shuts out a new pair, Christ and the Holy Spirit: a most shameful pair of two males—or will the Holy Spirit be female? And a male is wounded by a female. One divine function is given to them, to manage the harmonizing of the Aeons. And from the fellowship of this office, two schools straightway, two chairs, a certain inauguration of the divided teaching of Valentinus. It was Christ's to lead the Aeons into the nature of conjugal unions (you see what a matter plainly) and of innate conjecture, and to make them fit for generation, and to bring into them the knowledge of the Father—that he can neither be grasped nor comprehended, nor attained by sight, nor by hearing, save through Monogenes.

And yet I will tolerate what they thus say that the Father knows us in sentiment. That perversity of doctrine I will rather mark out, that they were taught that the incomprehensibility of the Father is the cause of their perpetuity: but the comprehensibility of him is the Reason of their generation and formation. For by this arrangement I think it is insinuated that it is expedient for God not to be apprehended: since his incomprehensibility is the cause of perpetuity; but his comprehensibility is the cause not of perpetuity, but of birth and formation, which stand in need of perpetuity. But they constitute the Son as the comprehensible one of the Father. How, however, he is to be comprehended, Christ when brought forth then taught. But the proper work of the Holy Spirit was that, through the study of doctrine, all being made equal, they might know how to offer thanksgiving and might enter into true rest.

And so all are made equal in form and wisdom, all having become what each one is: no one anything different, because all are for one another. They are poured back into Nus, into Words, into Men, into Phileti. Equally the females into Sigas, into Zoas, into Churches, into Fortunatas: so that Ovid would have erased his Metamorphoses, had he known a greater one today. Thereupon they were refreshed and established and composed into rest from truth, and with great fruit of joy they sing hymns together to the Father. Joy spread also through himself, assuredly since his sons and grandsons sang well. Why should it not spread with all gladness, the Pleroma being freed? What helmsman does not rejoice even with indecorum? We see daily the wanton joys of sailors.

And so as sailors always exult at the signal; something of this sort also the Aeons do; now all one, even in form, let alone in sentiment; the new brothers and teachers Christ and the Holy Spirit also joining them, each one contributing to the common stock the best and fairest thing in which he flourished. Vainly, I think. For if all were one from the aforesaid equalization, the rationale of the contribution was superfluous, which consists for the most part in the grace of variety. All contributed one good thing, because all were one. Perhaps there may have been a rationale regarding the measure, or regarding the very form of the equalization already made. Therefore from a collection of contributions, as they say, in honor and glory of the Father, they fashion the most beautiful star of the Pleroma and its perfect fruit, Jesus. They surname him Soter, and Christ, and Word, from his paternal cousins.

And All Things now, as constructed from the plucking of all, like Aesop's Jackdaw, Hesiod's Pandora, Accius's Patina, Nestor's Cocetus, Ptolemy's Miscellany. How much nearer it would have been for him to be called Pancarpon, from certain Attic confections, by authors of names so idle? But in order to adorn from without also so great a collection of figurines, they bring forth angel-satellites for him: a kindred sort. If among themselves, it may be: but if consubstantial with the Soter (for I found it placed ambiguously), what will be his eminence among equal satellites?

This order therefore contains the first procession alike of Aeons being born, and marrying, and begetting; the most perilous fall of Sophia from desire of the Father; the most timely aid of Horos; the expiation of the Enthymesis and the Passion joined to it; the tutelage of Christ and the Holy Spirit; the reformed guardianship of the Aeons; the peacock-like adornment of the Soter; the hired priesthood of the angels. What remains, you say, farewell and applaud. Nay, what remains, I say, hear and cast away. For the rest, these things are said to have run their course within the assembly of the Pleroma; the first scene of the tragedy. But there is another buskin-wearing of a like pair outside the Pleroma, I mean: and yet if such things happened under the bosom of the Father within the circuit of Horos the guardian, what will happen outside now in the open, where God was not?

For the Enthymesis, or now Achamoth (which from this point, written thus, is known by this one uninterpretable name alone)—when she was expelled along with the fault of her inseparable Passion into places alien to the light, which is the affair of the Pleroma, into that void and empty space of Epicurus, she is wretched even in respect of place. Certainly she had neither form nor any appearance, being a defective and abortive birth. While matters stand thus, Christ is moved from above, is led down through Horos, in order to give form to that abortion from his own powers with the form of substance alone, not also of knowledge. And yet she is left behind with some peculiar endowment in the meantime—an odor of incorruptibility—whereby, made aware of her condition, she might be prepared with a more ardent desire. Having performed this act of mercy, not without the fellowship of the Holy Spirit, Christ hastens back into the Pleroma. It is customary for names to be added also from acts of generosity.

The Enthymesis derived her name from an act: whence Achamoth comes is still sought; Sophia flows from the Father; the Holy Spirit from the angel in the presence of Christ, by whom when abandoned she had immediately felt desire. And so she too leapt forth to seek his light; whom if she had not known at all, as one who had worked invisibly, how was she seeking his unknown light together with him? Yet she tried, and perhaps would have apprehended him, had not the same Horos, who had come so prosperously to her mother, now so inopportunely met the daughter, so as even to cry out against her, Jao, as if saying "Citizens, stand back," or "By Caesar's faith,"—whence Jao is found in the Scriptures.

Thus repelled from proceeding further, and having no power to fly over the Cross, that is Horos, because she had not been trained as any Laureolus of Catullus, as one abandoned she began to be afflicted by that Passion of hers in manifold and tangled confusion, with every kind of it: with grief, because she had not accomplished her undertaking; with fear, lest as of light, so also of life she should be deprived; with consternation, and then with ignorance. Nor as her mother. For her mother was an Aeon: and she fared worse according to her condition: with yet another wave also rising, of conversion namely toward Christ, by whom she had been vivified, and tempered into this very conversion.

Come now, let the Pythagoreans learn, let the Stoics acknowledge, let Plato himself learn from whence matter—which they would have to be unborn—derived its origin and substance into this entire fabric of the world, a thing which not even that Mercurius Trismegistus, master of all Natural Philosophers, recognized. You have heard of Conversion, another kind of Passion; from this, they say, every soul of this world was constituted, even that of the Demiurge himself, that is, of our God. You have heard of grief and fear; from these the rest were initiated. For from her tears the entire nature of waters flowed. Here one must ponder what outlet this took, with how many groaning floods of tears it inundated. She had false drops, and bitter, and sweet, and warm, and cold, and bituminous, and iron-laden, and sulphurous ones—and certainly also poisonous ones, so that from thence Nonacris sweated out that which killed Alexander, and from thence flowed the waters of the Lyncestae which make men drunk, and from thence dissolved the Salmacis which makes males effeminate.

Achamoth piped out heavenly rains: and we too take care to preserve in cisterns even the griefs and tears of others. Likewise from her consternation and terror the corporeal elements were derived. And yet amid such a surrounding of solitude, amid such a surveyed destitution, she laughed in the meantime—she who, recalling the sight of Christ, from that joy shed the light of laughter. Whose beneficence of providence was it, of such a kind as compelled her to laugh, so that we might not always dwell in darkness? Nor should you be astonished that so splendid an element radiated upon the world from her joy, since so necessary an instrument also flowed down upon the age from her sadness? O laughter that gives light! O weeping that gives moisture! And yet she could have already dealt as a remedy with the horror of that place. For she would have dispelled all its darkness as often as she wished to laugh, or lest she be compelled to attach her deserters to herself.

For she turns to prayers, herself also after the manner of a mother. But Christ, whom it now irked to go forth again outside the Pleroma, appointed as his vicar the Paraclete, the Soter (this will be Jesus, the Father of all the Aeons having bestowed upon him the sum of all power, that all things might be subjected to him; so that in him, according to the Apostle, all things might be established)—he sends him to her with office and escort of coeval angels; you might believe also with twelve fasces. There at last, Achamoth, shaken by his pompous advent, immediately drew a veil over herself, first in the duty of veneration and modesty; then she contemplates him, and his fruitful presentation. With the powers she had thereby conceived she goes to meet him: Lord, hail!

Here, I suppose, he takes her up, confirms and forms her by recognition now, and purges her from all the injuries of Passion—not with the same negligence in banishment of those things set apart, as had befallen in the mother's misfortunes. But indeed he confounded the practiced vices and those made corrupt by habit; and thus, solidified into a mass, he separated them apart for the corporeal preparation of matter, transforming from the incorporeal passion implanted in it a fitness and nature by which it might soon be able to attain rival equivalences of bodily substances, so that a twofold condition of substances might be ordered: from the vices, the worst kind; from the conversion, the passional kind. This will be the matter which brought us into conflict with Hermogenes and the rest who presume that God worked all things from matter, not from nothing.

From this point Achamoth, freed at last from all her evils, behold, she now advances and ripens into greater works. For, warmed by the joy of such success out of misfortune, and at the same time, as it were, leavened from within by the very contemplation of the angelic lights—I am ashamed, but there is no other way to express it—she in some manner conceived a longing within herself for them, and immediately swelled with a spiritual conception, having drunk in and made intimate to herself the very image which the force of her rejoicing and the eagerness of her itching delight had imbibed. She gave birth at last, and thence a trinity of kinds was made, from a trinity of causes. One material, which is from passion; another animate, which is from conversion; a third spiritual, which is from imagination.

Made more practiced in managing affairs by the authority, namely, of three children, she resolved to form each kind individually. But the spiritual kind she could not so attain, being herself also spiritual. For the fellowship of nature, being nearly equal and consubstantial, denied them power over each other. With that intent she turned to the animate one; having set forth the teachings of the Soter. And first—which must be pronounced and read and heard with great horror of blasphemy—she fashions this our God, and the father of all except the heretics, and the Demiurge, and the king of all things that are after him. For all things are from him, if indeed from him, and not rather from Achamoth herself, from whom he, perceiving nothing of her in secret, and moved as if by an external seal-impression from without, was set in motion into all his operation.

Finally, from this ambiguity of persons in the works, they blended for him the name of Metropator, with the other appellations distinguished according to the states and positions of the works: so that of animate substances, which they commend to the right, they call him father; of material ones, which they assign to the left, they name him Demiurge; but King commonly over the whole universe.

But not even the propriety of the names corresponds to the propriety of the works from which all the names derive, since she by whom the things were done ought to be called all these things—except that not even by her. For when they say that Achamoth devised images in honor of the Aeons, they again twist this to the Soter as author, who operated through her: so that she herself might give the image of the invisible and unknown Father—unknown, of course, and invisible to the Demiurge—and that she might fashion the same Demiurge as the son of Nous, while the work of the Archangel of the Demiurge might express the remaining Aeons. When I hear of so many images of three, I ask—do you not now want me to laugh at the images of that most perverse painter of theirs? The woman Achamoth, an image of the Father? And the Demiurge ignorant of his mother, much more of the Father? An image of Nous ignorant of the Father?

And the servant angels as likenesses of their lords? This is to paint a mule from a donkey, and to describe Ptolemy from Valentinus.

Therefore the Demiurge, established outside the limits of the Pleroma, in the shameful vastness of eternal exile, founded a new province—this world—having purged the confusion and distinguished the diversity of that twofold substance, from the mass of animate and material things. From incorporeal things he builds bodies, heavy and light, rising and sinking, celestial and terrestrial; then he bounds the sevenfold scene of the heavens itself with his throne above; whence also the sabbath is named, from the hebdomad of his seat; and Achamoth the mother is called Ogdoad, from the argument of the primogenital Ogdoad. The heavens, moreover, they reckon as noeric, and sometimes they make them angels, as also the Demiurge himself: and likewise Paradise, a fourth archangel, since they also place this above the third heaven, from whose power Adam drew, having sojourned there among little clouds and little trees. Ptolemy remembered well enough the childish sayings that apples grow in the sea and fish in trees: so also in heavenly things he presumed upon nut-groves.

The Demiurge works in ignorance, and therefore perhaps does not know that trees ought to be planted only in the earth. Of course the mother knew. Why did she not suggest it?—she who also furnished her own product. But why, while building so great an eminence for her son through those works which, before the ingenuity of the Valentinians, testify him to be father and god and king, she did not wish these things to be known to herself also—I shall inquire later.

Meanwhile it must be held that Sophia is surnamed both Earth and Mother—as it were Mother-Earth—and, what you may laugh at still more, also the Holy Spirit. Thus they have conferred upon her every honor as a woman, I suppose also a beard, not to mention the rest. Otherwise the Demiurge was so little master of things—being of animate stock, of course, too weak to approach spiritual things—that, thinking himself alone, he would proclaim: I am God, and besides me there is none: yet he certainly knew that he had not existed before. Therefore he also understood that he had been made, and that whoever made the thing made was some maker. How then did he seem to himself to be alone, if not certain, at least suspicious of some maker?

The infamy is more tolerable among them in the case of the devil, perhaps because a more sordid origin admits it; for he is reckoned from the wickedness of that grief, from which they note the births of angels and demons and all spiritual malices. And yet they affirm that the devil too is the work of the Demiurge, and they call him the world-holder, and they defend him as belonging to higher powers, as spiritual by nature, rather than the Demiurge, as animate. He merits preference from them, for whom all heresies are procured.

The strongholds of the individual powers they place within these boundaries. In the highest heights the Pleroma of thirty presides, with the boundary marking the outermost line. Below it Achamoth measures out the middle region, treading upon her son: for the Demiurge is subject in his hebdomad, and the devil still more so, in this common world of ours, made of heaven and earth and body together, as set forth above, from the most useful misfortunes of Sophia—so that there would not even be space for the breath of returning air, that tender garment of all bodies, that indicator of all colors, that instrument of the seasons—had not even this been fashioned by the grief of Sophia; just as animate things by her fear, and her conversion fashioned the Demiurge himself. Into all these elements and bodies fire was fanned: whose original passion in Sophia, since they have not yet disclosed it, I will for the present argue was shaken out by her little agitations.

For you might believe that amid such great vexations she also had a fever.

Such fictions about God or about gods as are told about a man! For the Demiurge, having labored to make the world, turns his hands to man, and does not take his substance from this, they say—not from this dry earth which we alone know, as though even if it were dry afterward, it had not yet at that time, with the waters previously separated, dried out with the surviving mud still upon it—but from the invisible body of that matter, namely the philosophical kind, from its fluid and fusible part: whence this came, I cannot estimate, because it exists nowhere. For if fusible and fluid is a quality of liquid, and all liquid flowed from the tears of Sophia, it follows that we must believe mud to have been constituted from the phlegm and rheum of Sophia, which are accordingly the dregs of tears, just as mud is what settles from waters.

Thus the Demiurge moulds man, and animates him from his own breath: so he will be both earthen and animate, made in the image and likeness: a fourfold thing: so that the image is reckoned as earthen, that is material—even though the Demiurge is not from matter—while the likeness is animate; for such also is the Demiurge. You have two. Meanwhile they say that a fleshly surface was afterward woven over the earthen one, and that this is the tunic of skin subject to sense.

Now there was in Achamoth, from the substance of her mother Sophia, a certain peculiar spiritual seed: just as Achamoth herself had also sequestered it in the son the Demiurge, he too knowing nothing of this. Receive the ingenuity of this clandestine providence. For to this end she had both deposited and concealed it, so that when the Demiurge should presently communicate a soul from his own breath into Adam, that spiritual seed might likewise be derived as through a channel into the earthen one: and thus, having been gestated in the material body as in a womb, and grown up there, it might be found fit to receive at some point the perfect Word. And so when the Demiurge commits the offshoot of his own soul into Adam, the spiritual man lay hidden, inserted by the breath and likewise introduced into the body, because the Demiurge knew no more of the mother's seed than of the mother herself.

This seed they call the Church, the mirror of the Church above, and the endowment of man: accordingly assigning it from Achamoth, just as the animate from the Demiurge; the earthen, from the substance of the Archons; the flesh, from matter. You have a new, that is fourfold, Geryon.

So also they divide the destiny of each. For the material, that is the carnal, which they also call the left, they assign undoubted destruction; for the animate, which they also call the right, a doubtful outcome, inasmuch as it wavers between the material and the spiritual, and is owed to whichever side it has inclined the most. As for the spiritual, it is sent forth into comparison with the animate, and is educated with it and exercised in its ways of life as far as it can be. For the animate needed also the disciplines of the perceptible; to this end the preparation of the world was foreseen; to this end the animate Soter was presented in the world, for the salvation, namely, of the animate.

By yet another monstrous composition, they wish him to have put on the substances of those things whose sum he was to bring to salvation: so that he received the spiritual indeed from Achamoth, the animate—which he presently put on from the Demiurge—being Christ; but as for the corporeal, constructed from animate substance by a wondrous and ineffable ingenuity of reason, he conferred upon it for the sake of administration a power, by which he might be subject, against his will, to encounter and sight and touch and death. But that there was nothing material in him, as being alien to salvation—as though he were necessary to others than those in need of salvation. And all this, so that by alienating the condition of our flesh from Christ, they may also expel it from the hope of salvation.

Now I return to Christ: into whom certain persons insert Jesus with as much license as they stuff the spiritual seed into the animate being with inflation, cramming in with some stuffing-art I know not what, belonging both to their men and their gods. For the Demiurge has his own Christ as a natural son. This one, then, animate, was brought forth by him, proclaimed through the Prophets; set forth in the question of Prepositions, that is, born through a virgin, not from a virgin, because he was carried into the virgin and passed through her in a transitory rather than a generative manner; through her, not from her; suffering her to be not a mother but a pathway. Upon this Christ, therefore, the Soter then flew down in the sacrament of baptism through the likeness of a dove. But there was also in Christ a seasoning of spiritual seed even from Achamoth, lest the rest of the stuffing should wither away.

For in the figure of the principal Tetrad, they pack him with four substances: the spiritual one of Achamoth, the animate one of the Demiurge, the corporeal one that is unutterable, and that soteric one, that is, the dove-like. And the Soter indeed remained in Christ, impassible, inaccessible, unapprehensible. Finally, when it came to his apprehension, he departed from him at the acknowledgment of Pilate. Likewise he did not admit the injuries of the mother's seed, equally unsubject, and not even known to the Demiurge himself. But the animate and fleshly Christ suffers, as a delineation of the higher Christ, who, in order to give Achamoth substantial, not cognitive, form, had been fixed to the Cross, that is, to Horos. Thus they press everything into images—plainly they themselves are imaginary Christians.

Meanwhile the Demiurge, still ignorant of all things, though he too will proclaim something through the Prophets, not even understanding this his own work (for they divide the prophetic patronage among Achamoth, the seed, and the Demiurge): when he received news of the Soter's coming, he ran up quickly and joyfully, with all his forces, like the Centurion of the Gospel. And being enlightened concerning all things by him, he also learns from him his own hope, namely that he is to succeed to the place of his mother. Thus henceforth, secure, he pursues the administration of this world, and especially the protection of the Church by name, for as long a time as shall be needful.

I will now gather together from their scattered parts, in order to conclude, what they discuss concerning the arrangement of the whole human race. Having professed a threefold nature from the beginning, they yet divide the unity in Adam thenceforth through the individual properties of the kinds, having seized the occasion for this distinction from the posterity of Adam himself, also tripartite in moral differences. Cain, Abel, and Seth, as it were the fountainheads of the human race, they derive into as many arguments of nature and essence. The choic, degenerated to perdition, they assign to Cain: the animate, deliberated to a middle hope, they compose under Abel: the spiritual, prejudged to certain salvation, they store up in Seth. So also they distinguish souls themselves by a twofold property, good and evil: according to the choic state from Cain, and the animate from Abel, the spiritual from Seth.

Upon what befalls them they superimpose now not nature but indulgence, so that those upon whom Achamoth rains down in the higher regions as good souls, that is, those enrolled in the animate census. For the choic kind, that is, evil souls, can never receive saving things. For they have declared their nature immutable and unreformable. That grain of spiritual seed, therefore, small and tiny in its casting, but by the instruction of this faith is increased and advanced, as we said above: souls which so surpass the rest in this very thing that the Demiurge, then ignorant, held them in high esteem. From their register, therefore, he was accustomed to choose both kings and priests: those who now also, if they shall have apprehended the full and perfect knowledge of these trifles, having been made natural by the kinship of the spiritual condition, will obtain certain salvation—nay, salvation owed to them in every way.

And therefore they do not consider good works necessary for themselves, nor do they observe any duties of discipline; evading also the necessity of martyrdom by whatever interpretation they please. For this rule, they say, was laid down for the animate seed: that the salvation which we do not possess by privilege of status, we should work out by the suffrage of action. For us, enrolled in this seed, who are of imperfect essence, because we are reckoned among the loves of Philetus, and indeed among abortions, as their mother was. But woe to us indeed, if we transgress in any respect the yoke of discipline: if we grow numb in works of holiness and justice: if we prefer to make confession elsewhere, I know not where, and not under the powers of this age, before the tribunals of governors. But they vindicate their nobility both by the passivity of their life and by the diligence of their sins, with Achamoth flattering her own, since she herself also advanced by sinning.

For even in honor of the supernal conjugal unions above, it is said among them that the mystery must always be meditated upon and celebrated, by cleaving to a companion, that is, a woman; otherwise he is degenerate and not a legitimate son of truth, who, having sojourned in the world, has not loved a woman nor joined himself to her. And what will the eunuchs do, whom we see among them?

There remains the matter of the consummation and the dispensation of reward. When Achamoth shall have pressed the whole harvest of her seed, and then begun to gather it into the barn, or when it has been brought to the millstones and ground into flour and hidden in the kneading-troughs of the mixture, until the whole is leavened, then the consummation will press on. Therefore first Achamoth herself is transferred from the region of the middle, from the second floor to the highest, restored to the Pleroma: and immediately that compact Soter receives her, her bridegroom, that is: both together a new marriage. And this will be in the scriptures the bridegroom and the bride, and the bridal Pleroma. You would believe that, where there is migration from place to place, the Julian laws also intervene, as well as the wedding feast. And the Demiurge will then move from the hebdomad beneath the heavens to the higher regions, into the now empty upper room of the mother, knowing her now yet not seeing her.

For if it were so, he would always have preferred to remain ignorant.

But the human race will go to this end; the choic and material kind, to total destruction: because all flesh is grass, and the soul is mortal among them, unless it has found salvation through faith. The souls of the just, that is, ours, will be transmitted to the Demiurge in the receptacles of the middle region. We give thanks; we shall be content to be reckoned with our God, to whom we ascend. Nothing animate is admitted into the palace of the Pleroma, except the spiritual company of Valentinus. There, therefore, men are first stripped, that is, the inner men. But to be stripped is to lay aside the souls with which they seemed to be clothed, and they will render these back to their Demiurge, from whom they turn them away. But the spirits themselves will become entirely intellectual, subject neither to detention nor to sight: and so they will be received invisibly into the Pleroma. Secretly, if it be so—what then? They will be distributed to the angel attendants of the Soter.

As sons, do you think? No. But as servants?

Not even that. But as images? Would that it were even this. As what then, if one is not ashamed to say? As brides. Then those Sabine women, snatched away, will applaud one another over their marriages. This will be the reward of the spiritual ones, this the prize of believing. Such fables are useful, so that Marcus, or Caius in this flesh bearded, and all these things; a stern husband, father, grandfather, great-grandfather, certainly what suffices—a male—in the Bridal Chamber of the Pleroma by an angel, by my silence I have already said it and perhaps you will bring forth some Onesimus the Aeon. For the proper conducting of these nuptials, in place of the torch and the flame-colored veil, then I believe that hidden fire will burst forth, and having consumed all substance; itself also, when all things have been reduced to ashes, will end in nothing; and no more fable. But lest I be rash, having betrayed so great a mystery even by mocking it.

I must fear lest Achamoth, who wished not to be known even by her son, go mad; lest Philetus be angered, lest Fortuna be embittered. And yet I am a man of the Demiurge, I have to turn aside thither, where after death there is no overshadowing at all: where I am rather clothed upon than stripped: where even if I am stripped of my sex, I am reckoned among the angels; not an angel, not a female angel. No one will do anything to me, whom they will find to be male even then.

I will produce finally, as an encore after so great a fable, also those things which, lest they obstruct the order and scatter the reader's attention by their interjection, I preferred to defer to this place, commended in various ways by the emenders of Ptolemy. For there arose from his very school disciples surpassing their teacher, who would attach a double marriage to their Bythos, Thought and Will. For one Thought was not enough, since he could have produced nothing from it, whereas from two the bringing forth is most easy. The first marriage: Monogenes and Truth; Truth female in the image of Thought; Monogenes male in the image of Will. For the force of Will, which alone gives effect to Thought, holds the rank of the male.

Others more modest, mindful of the honor of divinity, in order to remove from him even the disgrace of a single marriage, preferred to assign no sex to Bythos: and perhaps they say This God in the neuter gender, not Hic Deus. Others on the contrary go further, and say both male and female, lest the commentator on the Annals, Fenestella, should think the hermaphrodite exists only among the people of Luna.

There are those who do not defend the primacy of Bythos but his posteriority; placing the Ogdoad before all things, itself also from a Tetrad, but derived under other names. For they establish first Proarche, second Anennoeton, third Arrheton, fourth Aoraton. From Proarche, therefore, there proceeded first and in the fifth place Arche: from Anennoeton, second and in the sixth place Acataleptos: from Arrheton third and in the seventh place Auonomaston: from the Invisible, fourth and in the eighth place Agenneton. What reason arranges this, so that individual things are born in two places, and indeed at such intervals, I prefer to be ignorant of rather than to learn. For what soundness can those things have which are set forth so perversely?

How much better are those who, having removed this whole tedium from the midst, wished for no Aeon proceeding from another through steps truly Gemonian, but—the napkin being thrown (as they say)—at once expelled this eightfold company from the Father and his Ennoia. For they bear names from his very movement. When, they say, he thought to bring forth, he was called Father. When he brought forth, because he brought forth truly, she was called Truth. When he wished himself to be proved, he was pronounced Man. But those whom he foreknew when he brought them forth, she was then named Church. Man uttered a word, and this is the firstborn Son: and to the word life was added, and the first Ogdoad was concluded. But this tedium is not small.

Hear the other inventions of the Cuckoo of Ennius, a more distinguished teacher among them, who also by his pontifical authority decreed in this manner. There is, he says, before all things a Proarche, inconceivable, and unutterable, and unnameable, which I name Monotetes.

With this there was another power, which I also call Henotes. Monotes and Henotes, that is Solitariness and Unity, being one, brought forth, without bringing forth, the intellectual beginning of all things, unborn, invisible, which speech called Monad. With this there is present a consubstantial power, which he calls Union. These powers therefore—Solitariness, Singularity, Unity, Union—propagated the remaining emanations of the Aeons. O what a difference! Let Union and Unity, Singularity and its own Solitariness be changed, though you may have designated them differently, it is one thing.

More humane now is Secundus, as he is briefer, dividing the Ogdoad into two Tetrads, into right and left, into light and darkness; only he does not wish that leaping and defective power to be derived from any of the thirty Aeons, but from the fruits coming from their substance.

Concerning the Lord Jesus himself, how great a diversity is split off? Some construct him from the little flowers of all the Aeons, others contend that he consisted of the ten alone, whom Word and Life brought forth; whence also the eyes of Word and Life converged upon him: others from the twelve rather, from the offspring of Man and Church: and therefore they say he was called Son of Man; others that he was fashioned by Christ and the Holy Spirit, provided for the establishment of the universe: and rightly, heir of the paternal appellation. There are those who have conceived that the Son of Man should be said to derive from elsewhere: although they have presumed that the Father himself called himself Man as a great mystery of the name, so that you may hope for something greater from the faith of that God to whom you are now made equal? Such talents overflow among them from the abundance of the maternal seed.

And thus the doctrines of the Valentinians, growing up, have now grown out into the forests of the Gnostics.